Castellan

by David Annandale

  Gorvenal looked up the staircase to the level floor. Thousands of daemons stood between the squad and the palace gate. The way forward was clear. The destination was not.

  The daemons came for them again, keening the song of mourning and of vengeance. In the higher pitches of the writhing melody, Gorvenal thought he detected a sound familiar from human hymns. It was a plea for expiation. The abominations were crying out repentance to their dark god.

  The perversion of true faith was disgusting. Gorvenal raised his Nemesis warding staff, and it blazed with his righteous anger. ‘Brothers,’­ he called, ‘exterminate them all!’

  ‘We are the hammer!’ they all shouted. In a tight formation, they charged up the stairs and into the sea of monsters.

  They had fought their way halfway up to the floor when the movement of the walls grew suddenly more violent. From the direction of the blasted doors of the palace came a noise like the shifting of two mountains, and then there was an immense crack of stone masses coming together.

  ‘What was that?’ Destrian asked.

  ‘That,’ said Gorvenal, ‘was this corrupt palace sealing the breach.’

  The walls split. Translucence frosted. The heat spiked. The first brilliant filaments of the sun’s matter broke through into the palace.

  Crowe staggered across the wreckage of the orrery, calling for Drake. He had heard the Knight of the Flame’s last cry. He had not seen his brother’s fate.

  Footing was treacherous. The chamber did more than shake. It contracted as pressure on it increased. Stone bunched like flesh, turned brittle, and exploded into powder. Geysers of crystal fragments, vicious shrapnel, burst from the walls and floor. Dust and fire filled the room as the Masque’s bubble within the star failed. Crowe could see only a few yards in any direction.

  ‘Drake!’ he called again, his vox-casters at maximum. There was no answer.

  He reached the location where he had last seen his brother. The Knight of the Flame’s power armour, thrice-blessed and anointed with holy oils, had been torn open. It lay in fragments, scattered across a wide area of the floor. There was no body. Crowe heaved the hemisphere of a broken planet to the side. He found Drake’s gauntlets, but not his corpse. His sword, too, was missing.

  ‘You wield it still, brother,’ Crowe whispered. ‘No mere daemon could break so strong a hold as yours.’ He raised his voice. ‘I will find you, brother!’ he shouted. ‘This is my vow!’

  The only answer he received was the accelerating collapse of the room. The star raged, and the cracks in the walls became fissures. The crystalline palace was moments away from its dissolution.

  Crowe’s auto-senses were flashing red. The temperature in the chamber was already several hundred degrees.

  He turned towards the doorway, then stopped. He had seconds left with nowhere to go. He was in the centre of an architectural spiral with no exit.

  A poor death, said the sword. And I will be free. The scrape of the voice was satisfied, pleased to contemplate Crowe’s ultimate failure. You defeated the daemon, it said, yet you betray your first charge, warden. You will die, and in dying loose me upon your precious Imperium. Let your final thoughts be the measureless oceans of blood I will spill.

  Crowe looked back at the armour. There was one possibility. The pieces were large. Drake’s helmet was intact. So was his power pack. Crowe moved through the wreckage near the power pack. Beneath a huge orrery cog, he found Drake’s teleporter.

  I will find you, brother, he promised again.

  With a splintering crash that turned into the wail of captive souls, the walls collapsed. Crowe activated the teleporter. In the last moment before he ceased to exist inside the heart of a star, Crowe saw more than the blinding might of the sun break through the palace. He saw the collapsing matter of the daemon’s creation turn into something dense and sharp. The art of the Masque would outlive its creator’s presence in the materium long enough for an act of murder so great, it was art of the most grandiose and cruel kind. The palace was compressing itself into a dagger that would assassinate a star.

  ‘Nine minutes!’ Crowe voxed the bridge as he ran from the Tyndaris’ teleporter pad. ‘We have nine minutes to make the jump to the immaterium.’ He did not know what the fused, eldritch palace would do to Angriff. But he could guess. Angriff Primus was nine light minutes away from the star. When the sun died, it would take that long for the effects of its death to reach the Tyndaris. ‘Are all our forces aboard?’ Crowe asked.

  ‘All except the squad of Knight of the Flame Drake,’ said Saalfrank.

  Crowe winced. ‘Where are my brothers?’

  ‘Still inside the palace.’

  ‘Are you in contact with them?’

  ‘We are.’

  ‘Link me to them.’

  A moment later, Gorvenal’s voice arrived from the surface of the planet. ‘We give thanks to the Emperor that you still live, castellan,’ he said. He spoke over the sounds of battle and the shrieks of daemons.

  ‘What is your situation?’ Crowe asked.

  ‘The entrance to the palace is gone. We are sealed inside the walls.’

  Crowe stopped walking. The deck vibrated as Saalfrank pushed the Tyndaris’ engines through an emergency acceleration. There was no decision to be made about the squad’s fate. Everyone on the ship knew it. But the sensation of the ship pulling away from Angriff Primus felt like betrayal.

  He was standing before a tapestry that depicted the last stand of Tristis V, when two strike forces of the First Brotherhood gave their lives purging the planet of the forces commanded by the Lord of Change Ix’thar’ganix. The image of noble sacrifice towered above him. That he should see this image at this moment was an unmistakable sign. It drove home the fact that there was nothing he could do. It was no comfort. It was merely a reminder of the two sorrowful duties of the moment. It was the squad’s to be sacrificed. It was his to accept his brothers’ doom.

  ‘Destruction is about to overtake the Angriff system,’ Crowe told Gorvenal.

  ‘I understand, castellan. Is the enemy defeated?’

  ‘It is. We have triumphed, brother.’

  ‘Then I am grateful. We shall fight here to the last. The light of the Emperor burns the abominations in their very stronghold.’

  ‘You are His right hand,’ said Crowe. ‘Fight well.’

  ‘We shall. The Emperor protects.’

  ‘The Emperor protects.’

  Then there was nothing more to say, and there was nothing more Crowe could do. The fate of the Purifiers on Angriff Primus and of the Tyndaris were no longer in his hands.

  When he reached the bridge, the primary display was trained on the receding planet and the distant star. The vibration in the deck was violent. The engines strained to their limit, though the strike cruiser seemed to be moving with glacial slowness. The final minutes were slipping away too fast.

  Styer, Furia and Setheno stood next to Saalfrank’s command throne. Crowe remained at the back of the strategium, isolating himself and the sword from the others, but granting himself the license to be present long enough to see fate decided. The trio looked back and nodded to him. Alone on the starboard side of the strategium, Sendrax did not respond to his arrival.

  No one spoke. Crowe did not ask Saalfrank whether they would make the jump in time. All that remained to do was to bear witness.

  Crowe bore witness to Angriff going supernova. At first the star flickered, the moment of its death a phenomenon utterly removed from the materium. The flicker was the stain of the empyrean. After the flicker came the blaze. Angriff shone more brightly than it ever had before. It seared the void with the brilliance of its pain.

  The star exploded. Its outer layers expanded across the system, a sphere of absolute annihilation, swallowing the inner planets, erasing all trace of their existence, and of the hundreds of billions of souls who
had lived upon them. Civilisations that had endured for thirty thousand years only to be destroyed by the dance of the Masque now vanished even from memory.

  A monster worse than all-consuming fire raced ahead of the stellar material. It was a warp shockwave. It distorted space. It made the void bleed. The colours of the immaterium, screaming corruption and madness engulfed the system, one final cry of power from the daemonic engine. It arrived to consume every psychic life force in the system.

  The warp wave overtook Angriff Primus. Crowe saw the first moments of the planet’s final damnation, its transformation into a burning nightmare.

  Then the Tyndaris made its jump, leaving only flame behind.

  Epilogue

  Crowe stood at a lectern in the centre of the librarium’s meditation cell. He focused on the screen of a data-slate. He was watching for an error in his initial observations, wary of self-delusion. He did not think he had erred. Even if he hadn’t, he was only at the beginning of many more questions. But it was a start.

  The Black Blade of Antwyr snarled. It whispered promises of retribution. It did not offer Crowe glory. Not on this day. The daemon was too consumed by its own wrath. It had seen the moment of its freedom come, and then vanish again. It raged in its prison, and found no purchase on the spiritual walls that held it. The walls were even stronger than they had been before Angriff Primus. They had been reinforced by the blood of heroes. New mortar of sacrifice had been added to the stones of faith. Crowe honoured the sacrifices with a renewal of strength.

  The sword screamed, and Crowe allowed himself a careful, measured dose of satisfaction to hear the daemon so stymied.

  Antwyr returned to the endless list of torture reserved for its warden. Then its curses dissolved into incoherence. A stylus and parchment were on the lectern beside the data-slate, and Crowe picked up the stylus again, transcribing the sword’s words for the apparent nonsense to be parsed at a later date.

  Back and forth his attention went between the transcription and the date. Back and forth, the eternal pattern of his meditation. He went through the cycle of picts repeatedly, studying them as carefully as he would the sword’s rantings.

  The hidden must be found, he thought.

  In one pict out of hundreds, the hidden stared out at him.

  Footsteps approached his cell. He stepped back from the lectern, retreating to the far wall. Styer, Gared, Furia and Setheno entered the cell. They stayed near the doorway, keeping their distance. Crowe felt the sword lash out at them, shrieking and tempting at the same time. He was worried most about Gared, who had barely begun to recover his strength.

  ‘Are you sure he should be of our number?’ he had asked Styer when he had spoken with the justicar over the vox.

  ‘His understanding of these matters runs deeper than mine,’ said Styer. ‘We will want to hear his thoughts.’

  Now Crowe said to the four before him, ‘I would know your minds. The Ruinous Powers drew us deliberately, over the course of years, to Angriff. Are the games of fate at an end? Have we severed the threads of destiny in which the enemy sought to entrap us?’

  ‘My squad has come full circle,’ said Styer. ‘All the machinations we encountered from the moment of our first battle on Angriff Primus led us back here. Those machinations have failed. We triumphed. I feel we have earned a guarded optimism.’

  ‘Are we saying, then, that all of this has ultimately been the work of the Masque of Slaanesh?’ Crowe paused, letting the question sink in. ‘It is true,’ he went on, ‘that daemons we have fought in the pattern of incident that has led from the Sandava to the Angriff systems, a pattern stretching back more than a century, have all been creatures of the Dark Prince.’

  ‘Not for us,’ said Gared. ‘We have encountered other forms of abominations.’

  Setheno turned to Styer. ‘Do you feel liberated, justicar? Has a shadow been lifted from the path of your squad?’

  ‘I feel cautious,’ said Styer.

  ‘Good. There is no liberation for us. Our struggle is eternal.’

  ‘Perhaps we have closed this cycle,’ Furia suggested. ‘We cannot deny that there was a culmination of events on Angriff Primus.’

  ‘That much is certain,’ said Crowe. ‘But nothing is closed. Nothing can be, until the Cicatrix Maledictum itself is closed. The Cicatrix has opened many wounds, and will open many more.’

  ‘War is forever,’ Setheno said quietly. Even more quietly, in a whisper of darkness, she said, ‘Yet everything ends.’

  ‘We are not done with Angriff, either,’ said Crowe.

  ‘How can that be?’ Furia asked. ‘The system no longer exists.’

  ‘The fate of five Purifiers is unknown.’

  Styer frowned. ‘I mean no disrespect, castellan, but I believe we know exactly what has happened to them. We all grieve for the losses our Chapter has suffered on this day.’

  None more than Sendrax, Crowe thought. He had not spoken with Sendrax since his return to the Tyndaris. The lines of communication between them had been severed by the deaths of Sendrax’s battle-brothers. No questions hovered about their fates.

  ‘Knight of the Flame Drake vanished before I banished the Masque,’ Crowe said. ‘I found no body. We were inside the star of Angriff. Where he was taken I cannot say, but it was not somewhere in the materium. And then there is this.’ He pointed to the data-slate.

  The others advanced to the lectern, visibly bracing themselves against their proximity to the sword. The Tyndaris’ sensors had recorded the destruction of Angriff Primus up to the moment of the jump. The slate displayed a pict from the very beginning of the cataclysm, a fraction of a second after the wave had struck.

  ‘Look at that image,’ Crowe said, ‘and the ones before. You see the effect of the warp wave on the planet.’

  ‘I see annihilation,’ said Styer.

  ‘What’s this?’ Setheno asked. She was pointing to a spot in the upper left quadrant of the pict. The same spot that obsessed Crowe.

  ‘Quite,’ said Crowe. ‘Examine the other picts again, before and after.’

  They did as he asked, and Styer said, ‘It looks as if a portion of the planet was sheared away. Then it disappears.’

  ‘Yes. The rest of Angriff Primus is kept intact, subjected to final corruption before being obliterated by the supernova. But one piece is removed. Why?’

  ‘The palace,’ said Setheno.

  ‘The palace,’ Crowe repeated. ‘The Purifiers fight on. I will not abandon them.’

  ‘Your brothers are lost, yet miraculously they survive.’ Setheno’s golden eyes were as hard and merciless as ever. ‘Is this happenstance, or a trap?’

  Styer sighed. ‘Yet another machination,’ he said.

  ‘Or something deeper,’ said Crowe. He nodded to Setheno. ‘I, too, suspect the worst. So experience has taught us to do, and so we must do. But trap or not, it makes no difference. If this is a lure, then I shall find the next enemy that must be destroyed. But I will find Drake, and I will find his squad. This is my solemn vow.’

  ‘It is mine as well,’ said Styer.

  ‘And mine,’ said Gared.

  Furia and Setheno nodded.

  The sword had never stopped ranting during the exchange. The sibilant curses went on and on at the back of Crowe’s mind. Sometimes the Blade seemed to become more muted, and Crowe knew then it was targeting one of the other souls present. Now, though, for a single moment, the sword fell silent. The impact of that nothing was vertiginous. Crowe had to focus on grounding his stance to stay upright. One second of silence in more than a century was more ominous than a thousand shrieked curses. But the vows were made, and the sword ceased to speak.

  Then Antwyr laughed. Softly at first, a stuttering hiss, as if from the skeleton of a serpent. Then louder, rasping, grating, bone over rock. And louder and louder yet, until it was a thunder in the soul, a
n immense booming like the death of worlds yet sharp as an assassin’s stab.

  As high as the laugh rose, Crowe’s walls rose higher. The laugh could not overwhelm his defences. It did, though, echo in the minds and the souls of the others. Gared, the strongest psychic present, grunted, and took a step back from the lectern.

  ‘It is time I was alone,’ Crowe said.

  Without a word, the others left, the strength of the vow hanging in the air. Let Antwyr have its mirth, Crowe thought. Its expectations are futile.

  Let it laugh. Let it laugh at the fate it believed now awaited Crowe. Nothing would change his vow. Nothing would change his duty.

  He was castellan of the Grey Knights. He would guard the ramparts for the Emperor, for the Imperium, and for his brothers.

  The ramparts were infinite. So was his will.

  About the Author

  David Annandale is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Ruinstorm and The Damnation of Pythos, and the Primarchs novel Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar. He has also written Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine, the Yarrick series, several stories involving the Grey Knights, including Warden of the Blade and Castellan, and The Last Wall, The Hunt for Vulkan and Watchers in Death for The Beast Arises. For Space Marine Battles he has written The Death of Antagonis and Overfiend. He is a prolific writer of short fiction set in The Horus Heresy, Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar universes. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.

  An extract from Dark Imperium.

  The void is impossible for the human mind to encompass.

  Within the galaxy mankind calls home there are three hundred billion stars. Around these revolve hundreds of billions of worlds, and the spaces between are crowded by a diversity of objects which defy enumeration. Mankind’s galaxy is but one of trillions of galaxies in a universe of unguessable size. The distances between even proximate astronomical bodies are inconceivable to creatures evolved to walk the warmer regions of single small world.